The year was 2005 (you know it’s gotten bad when even 2005 has a quaint and nostalgic ring to it), and the first episode of a little Half-Life 2 mod series charmingly titled MINERVA: Metastasis was released. Metastasis itself only represented the first chapter in a planned MINERVA trilogy (the next chapter, Out of Time, never materialized, though creator Adam Foster isn’t afraid to hint at a possible return in the future), and it was a sequel to Foster’s earlier Half-Life 1 release, Someplace Else. Through exceptional level design, an intriguing narrative and remarkably well-paced gameplay, MINERVA was universally acclaimed and praised not just within the Half-Life community, but all around the greater gaming world.

The Metastasis “trilogy within a trilogy” concluded with the release of the last two episodes in October of 2007, and a year later, Foster began working at Valve, on a strange little game we used to call Half-Life 2: Episode Three. Since then, he’s done significant design work on Portal 2 (and god knows what that means about the aforementioned title), and presumably neglected little old MINERVA, which like many other HL2 mods, did not survive Valve’s May 2010 update for Mac support. Neglected, that is… until now!

So if you’ve never tried Metastasis before, this is your chance to play one of the finest single-player experiences Half-Life modding can offer (quite literally Valve-quality). But even if you’ve already played it many moons ago, then another playthrough might just be enough to keep the Half-Life drought at bay!

Great article as always, I’m also glad this mod was fixed, I remember in 2010 I tryed to make Minerva work on HL2: Lost coast, and it worked! there were some bugs that I had to fix like the HDR sky and in the last part of the game the gunship destroyed a small bridge and that crashed the game so I had to remove that, but that was it, I also found out interesting stuff doing that, like for example that the Zombine code is already present in HL2:LC, also other bits like the fast Zombies humping to the HL2 Buggy, mechanic that was later used in EP2.

Thank you for keeping this up. It must be frustrating not having anything to say at all. It’s really sad how little by little the fan run sites are dying with the relevance of Episode 3 or whatever they call it nowadays. I actually didn’t realize how long it had been since the last article until I saw this appear on my google reader.

I finished Minerva: Metastasis a couple months ago, and it absolutely blew me away, in a way I hadn’t felt since I completed Half-Life 2 and Episode Two for the first time. I’d honestly go so far to say that MINERVA was superior to Episode One. Things are only going to get better, since Adam Foster was hired by Valve. It’s awesome to see that Valve are supporting their modding community and even incorporating talented modders into their dev team.

It’s nice that they are releasing this on Steam, may just download it and give it another play through.